


See The Stars

by despairingdignities



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 15:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11558316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/despairingdignities/pseuds/despairingdignities
Summary: The Doctor comes to terms with the fact that she's a woman, and then goes to find the only person in the universe she knows would never truly leave her.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift for Paula to apologise for all the angst I've been spamming her with these past couple days! (I hope it's not terrible, hehe!) I hope everyone else enjoys it too. I think I might end up updating at some point because the idea of Thirteen and Missy travelling together is hilarious and irresistible all at once.

The darkness had relented in favour of a series of gentle, pastel reds, oranges, yellows seeping through holes in the canopy of those trees still left standing by the raging inferno; the Doctor’s eyes blinked open to see it, which prompted a small smile. Birds flew over the tops, skimming the leaves, unbothered by the smoke and the tragedy, spreading happiness - supposedly, the people who were still alive should be grateful for that. And they would be, eventually, but when sitting up to see the scale of the charred devastation left behind, the birdsong seemed less cheerful and more teasing. Haunting, almost, a song for the ghosts that would roam the destroyed and deserted ship floor to dance to even as they knew even their flickering half-existences were doomed to the void by the looming black hole. Overall, the Doctor mused, half-mentally and half-aloud through humming, it was terribly oxymoronic.

The clothes were suddenly too-big, too baggy, a shocking weight as the Time Lord tried to sit up and found the sleeves far too long and wide alike. With an urgency the jacket was pulled off and discarded into the ferns, forage, and dirt, the over-large hoodie also cast aside in the opposite direction, leaving the shirt and bare arms beside. Eyes blinking down at the slender, pale-white arm found there, a thought sparked in the new brain. One glance at the chest area confirmed the suspicions the Doctor had been harbouring - he, well, _she_ now, was a woman - and elicited a slight laugh.

Missy would find this new body of hers hilarious, all things considered. But the moment that thought occurred to her, the new frame was filled with a sudden frailty, her breaths failing to pass her lips and catching heavy and painful in her throat at the mental sound of the other woman’s name. _Missy._

Her oldest friend was out there, somewhere, wandering around the floor, calling out for her, probably alone. The moment his life was at risk the blonde man would have bolted, not wanting to die somewhere his stupid ‘followers’ could not find him. Were the situation less grave, the Doctor might have laughed at the thought of it, the death of a man so infinitely more selfish than the version of him she now knew. After all, you definitely can’t regenerate from being stretched into spaghetti in a black hole, and with Lucy Saxon dead there wasn’t much to recover to ‘resurrect’ him again. Most of those who had once followed him were killed that night at Broadfell, anyway.

But what if she was dead? What if her past incarnation’s last act of recklessness had killed her - what if she had died before she could even make an effort to find her? Both her hearts seemed to be gripped in fists at the thought of it, so painful that she nearly cried out, but she forcefully bit it back. Would Missy regenerate or just expire as her past self had chosen to, in her tenth incarnation’s arms? These unanswered questions were agonising and she needed to find the answers before they were gone.

The brunette had disappeared into the growing night with the bleach-blonde man, her past self, towards the elevators - but not before the revelation, the silent promise imparted in their tight hand-hold. She couldn’t even have thought it, not with her past self around, it would have doomed her, and it could have still dependent on how loose-lipped she had chosen to be with her motivations. But the small, glinting knife, the blunt side of the blade Missy had pressed into the Doctor’s palm, was message enough. There had been no way to tell her that the message had been understood without giving her away, but she was sure that the other had known.

It was time to deal with the state of things, and by things she meant herself, although she was still trembling with the thoughts she had just considered. She glanced first down at the shirt, and at the trousers she was holding up with both hands. There was a belt, so, with much difficulty she managed to poke an extra hole in it and secure the belt about her waist; then, there was the issue with the length. She leant down - which was much easier to do in this younger body, she noted, none of the usual complaints from the back and knees - and rolled them up until she could just about walk without falling over the fabric. Still baggy, still uncomfortable, but bearable at the least - and that was all she needed for now.

There was nothing to be done about the size of the shoes, so she slipped them off; she did not need them, anyway, and the feel of the ground against her feet was quite cooling, calming. She picked up the hoodie from where it had laid crumpled on the floor for several minutes, shrugged it on, rolled up the sleeves. After a few moments looking contemplatively at the scrunched up jacket, she decided the hoodie was all she would need. She could leave the hoodie and the shoes as some kind of bizarre monument to her past self, to the old man.

She caught blonde strands at the edge of her vision and felt them where they tickled her chin. So, she still wasn’t ginger; she was a _woman,_ and the powers that be still couldn’t stomach making her ginger. A long sigh passed her lips as she started treading through the forest, kneading the soft soil with her feet. The heat must have made it slightly more malleable.

It seemed the only thing left to test was her voice. “Hello?” she tried out - well, she clearly wasn’t _Scottish_ anymore, and her friend would have several reasons to be dismayed about that little nugget of inspiration. Always British, though, she thought, so where exactly _was_ she supposedly from on the little island? She’d been there before, of course, she’d been everywhere before, so it was somewhat irritating that she couldn’t remember the name of the place.

Oh, well.

Just on the horizon, standing tall, doors closed, was the elevator - Missy should be somewhere around here, if she hadn’t wandered off - and the Doctor quickened her pace in response, calling out, her voice reverberating around the open space. Echoing, so hopefully anyone around would hear it. “Missy?”

No verbal response came, so the Doctor tentatively reached out with her mind, an offer of a hand - and she felt someone, a familiar someone, and a rush of hope filled her as the offer was taken, clung onto. Her gait lengthened and she surprised even herself at the length of stride that had come with adrenaline. _Missy was alive._ Maybe perfectly okay, maybe just barely hanging on by threads, but alive - and that meant there was still time, and plenty of it. Perhaps even infinity to travel the stars at her side as they had promised as children, when they were Thete and Koschei running together through Gallifrey’s red grasses, under silver-leaved trees that looked like flame under morning’s light?

She had to shrug the hopeful thought away and focus on finding her. Her eyesight was keener, spotting the little details like where the dewdrops were, or where exactly the flames had stopped by the char-marks on leaves or the piles of ash. There seemed to be pacing in circles and staring for long almost-hours that were in reality only mere minutes before the small blur of purple caught her eyes. Tyrian purple, almost.

“Missy,” the blonde woman breathed, spotting the small miracle circle that had seemed to form around the Time Lady. It seemed like the flames had been reluctant to touch her, almost, although she knew that could never be the reason why. Flames were unrelenting, uncaring about what was beautiful and what was not, shown by the decimation of nature, of this forest. But still, Missy herself was unharmed, however that might be.

A tree had collapsed in on her, and while her new body was significantly more slight than the others, the Doctor managed to haul it away and let it fall on its side in the opposite direction, the trunk rolling some way before halting. A groan of pain was barely audible as she prised it away, and while that would usually be a bad sign, here it was the most hopeful thing she had heard all day.

Blue eyes blinked open. Oh, those eyes, like ice, that she’d never thought she’d see again, piercing into her.

It - her name - came out on a breath again, because she barely believed it, and she pinched herself more than once, not minding the little red marks it left - they soon faded. “Missy. You’re alive. You’re _fine._ ”

“Well now,” the Time Lady replied, stirring feebly and making various more tiny noises of pain, “ _Fine_ might be a bit of a stretch.”

It was only after this statement had been made that Missy appeared to work out who she was talking to, and she shook her head vigorously, with a wicked grin. “Doctor? Is that really you? I can’t laugh right now, for God’s sake, my ribs are broken - but Rassilon be damned, you’re -”

“A woman?” The Doctor tried to finish, furrowing her eyebrows. “I didn’t think you’d find that _quite_ as funny as you seem to.”

Missy bit her lip, and stifled giggles. “No, you wee silly thing, you’re - you’re from _Yorkshire_ !” At this point, the laughter broke free, which she regretted quickly and placed her hands against her ribs. “Ow.” 

“And I’m _still_ not ginger,” The Doctor huffed at her, although relieved to find out where she was supposedly from, “Can you believe, thirteen times and I’ve never once been ginger?”

“About two per cent of the human population are ginger, dear,” her friend pointed out, “That’s one time in fifty, so you might be waiting for a while yet.” Her eyes wandered to her bare feet. “You’d fit right in as a child of nature with no shoes on like that. Like that singer from not-long-ago…”

The conversation was distracting, so the Doctor only frowned and ended it, and chose instead to inspect Missy’s injuries - the ones she could see, anyway. Her leg was broken, and she’d mentioned the broken ribs, but was there anything else?

“Did anything else happen to you?” the Doctor asked calmly, “Is there anything else I need to know about?”

Missy’s grin faltered, and despair rushed in to replace it. Her eyes glanced back up at the sky. “I’m going to die, Doctor,” she whispered, “honest-to-God die. No people with their voodoo magic to bring me back, no regeneration, no nothing. Just _die._ He shot me with his laser screwdriver. It’s taken some effort to hang on this long. But now you’ve seen me and I you...I think I’m okay with that, now.”

That was something she couldn’t let concede; she lifted Missy’s head up, let it rest on her lap where she now kneeled in the grasses. Her fingers absentmindedly combed through the other’s hair. “You’re not allowed to give up, Missy. You would never, ever give up. We have to see the stars, remember?”

But the Time Lady had already reconciled herself with her fate, wouldn’t let herself get hopeful of any other outcome/ She was doomed, doomed to whichever circle of hell she was heading for. Maybe she should have paid more attention to Dante Alighieri when he was explaining his literature to her, on one of her many adventures to past Italy. She was a sucker for a good renaissance; something she and the Doctor apparently shared, albeit with slightly different definitions. “He’s going to regenerate into me. Find him - her - me - and make sure she - I - succeed in turning good, alright?”

“You succeeded, too.”

Those eyes were even more beautiful when tears welled up in them, sparkled but didn’t quite have the weight to fall, suspended almost in time. “You think so?”

Her words reminded the Doctor so much of that night on the TARDIS that they ached somewhere deep in her stomach, but this time she didn’t step back, let go, or resist hope. This time, she just held onto her friend’s hands, and nodded. “Yes. Actually, no. I don’t think so, I know so.”

Bittersweet tears fell from Missy’s eyes and the Doctor wiped them gently away.

“I’m sorry. I was coming back,” Missy whispered, “I was coming back for you. I thought I was going to die and you weren’t going to know that…”

That thought dug deep into her like a knife. Missy, alone, not knowing that she knew, fading...suddenly the grateful feeling that she had made it in time was far more potent. The older woman was going to hate her for what she was about to do, but she had to do it; it was selfish, really, the only selfish act she would allow herself.

Selfish because she could not bear travelling the broad and beautiful universe without her friend just when the opportunity had arisen to do it. Selfish because she could not allow the awful bleach-blonde man this beautiful woman had once been to win, to tear them apart just when they were coming back together. Selfish because over their childhood, the years in the Vault and even in this moment she was still falling, she had fallen in love with her.

“I know,” the blonde woman whispered, hushing her, pulling hair out of her eyes and face with careful fingers, smiling. “Missy, I know.”

“Good,” came the long, relieved sigh in reply, “Now, enjoy being young and beautiful and stealing my thunder, will you? I’m just going to...go to sleep...maybe I’ll see the stars?”

Missy curled into her. Cat like, tired, exhausted - she looked younger, too - and she knew that it had to be done now or never. Tears that Missy hidden by burying her face in the Doctor’s shirt dripped onto fabric.

“You will see the stars, love,” the Doctor whispered, gently teasing her shirt away, leaning down and pressing her lips gently to Missy’s, “but not only in your dreams.”

She let her regeneration energy flow into the cracks and crevices, healing broken bones and injuries she could not even see, and with each new one she discovered, her heart broke even more. How broken and injured had Missy been? Thoughts that were not hers drifted into her mind - telling her not to be stupid, to stop it, she doesn’t deserve this - but Missy does, she _does,_ she deserves this so much and that’s what spurs her on.

Eternity passed, it seemed, before she pulled back and looked into those eyes again. They were nearly resentful, and they screamed at her that she was stupid. Grinning away.

“You sentimental idiot,” Missy scolded, but a grin was steadily spreading over her lips. Just because she had accepted it, didn’t mean that she’d wanted to die. Of course she hadn’t. She deserved a far more dramatic ending than _that._ Whatever he’d said, the past-her who had bled out, that wouldn’t have been her perfect ending. Any way she could expire now, with the Doctor at her side, was more perfect than anything else could ever be. “You little, sentimental idiot.”

Helping Missy to her feet, the Doctor laughed when she found she was still taller. Only slightly so, but taller all the same. She missed being much taller, but she would take what she could get. “Not so little, am I? Now, let’s go, shall we? There’s a TARDIS a-waitin’.”

“Wait. Do I have to…” Missy said uncertainly, glancing around her at the husk of the forest. This ‘outside world’ was equally as fabricated as the light that came through the windows in the Vault, but at least it felt real.

“Go back in the vault? Oh, no,” was the reply, “I’m going to need your help getting used to...well...this. And besides, we have some stars to see, don’t we?”

Missy’s eyes went wide and her smile spread to her eyes for the first time in a while. There was little more beautiful than Missy when she smiled with her eyes. “But Doctor, your _promise_ …”  The promise to guard her in the Vault for a thousand years. If The Master had succeeded, the Doctor might have had to guard her real body. She shivered. 

“I’ve made other promises too, you know, Missy. And it’s this one that I want to keep.”

The promise she had made when they were children, the promise she had always held above all others.

They were walking side by side now, hand in hand, Missy letting the Doctor guide her (because after all, she didn’t know where the TARDIS might be hiding). Missy turned around promptly at that answer, and kissed the Doctor, pulling the other woman in tight to her chest and never once wanting to let go. She tasted like home, like sugar, quite different from her past and yet all the same.

The blue box was there, dutifully waiting for the two women. It was so many opportunities and adventures all at once that neither could really quite imagine for all their thousands of years of life. They were unimaginable, which is what made them so much more important to experience - see, hear, feel, smell, taste, sense them all.

“Let’s see some stars,” Missy declared, leaning against the front as the Doctor did the click-of-the-fingers trick that she wished she could. The TARDIS seemed to have warmed to her presence, so she wouldn’t push her luck just yet. Maybe later.

There was something important left to say, though, and it wasn’t ‘I love you’, although the Doctor was sure she’d be saying that plenty over the rest of their lifetimes.

“Um, Missy?” The Doctor asked tentatively, and the brunette’s eyes flicked over to her.

“Yes, love?”

“Do you…” The blonde flushed, looking down, gesturing to her oversized attire. “Have any clothes I could borrow?”


	2. Chapter 2

The aura in the TARDIS was comfortable, with the Doctor leaning against the controls while Missy sat sideways in an armchair, leaning back with her legs over the armrest. As of yet, they hadn’t gone anywhere. Recuperation was necessary, and a new body to get used to, before they went sailing off through the blanket of space and infinite stars, searching for everything and nothing at all.

Yet the issue with living is that it always gets in the way, knots up your limbs so you trip and fall, or block up a path you thought was open. You can never quite do exactly as you planned, no matter how meticulous you are or how badly you might want to, there is always a problem. A little snag that turns out to be a much bigger snag than you had ever anticipated if not solved properly.

And the issue with becoming part of ‘humanity’, at least externally, was that you became so much more fallible to these little ‘snags’ as you got tangled up in the over-complicated nets that one might call ‘human emotions.’ These little bodies, not made to survive the adventures of Time Lords and their chaotic affairs, were so easily broken, and the only thing different was the two hearts that beat strongly in their chests. Even the sharpest of minds can easily be lead astray by emotions, and the clearer it got that the two women were riding a euphoric tidal wave of love and happiness, the closer the wave got to crashing against the shore.

Thoughts could be triggering, toxic, and the more you thought into things the more likely that got. Missy was a thinker – lying awake day, night, every hour – a daydreamer sometimes, but hardly ever a sleeper. The only way found to be able to get her to sleep was wrapped up in bed with the Doctor tucked into her chest, her arms around the slightly taller woman as she dreamt of who-knew-where or who-knows-what. The Doctor’s presence seemed to stave off the many nightmares that otherwise seeped into her head from memories of her darkest days or doings, nightmares that kept her awake.

For a while, a few days, it was okay at least. Playful, airy, excited to get going when her friend felt well enough to stand on her own two feet for infinity and beyond. The first task – to get clothes – had been accomplished fairly quickly, and to say the experience had amused both would be an understatement.

“What do you think?”

The dark fabric and its many layers was frankly too hot and too heavy for the Doctor, and she felt the design overwhelmed her. Her green eyes narrowed jokingly at Missy when she realised the other Time Lady was scarcely paying attention to the question, or to her, at all. It had become clear that Missy’s style wasn’t exactly what she’d go for, but she’d thought it would at least do for now, and be worth paying attention to. The few (six, since Missy had adamantly insisted they measure so she knew what shoes she’d need to be taller) centimetres between their heights was quite noticeable when it came to the skirt skittering about her knees.

Missy was perusing a folder filled with various music sheets, undoubtedly for the piano they had recently transferred from the Vault into one of the TARDIS’ countless vacant rooms. It seemed to make space whether they needed it or not, so it never really got much fuller. Her long fingers grazed the edges of pages, pulling them aside gently to see the titles of others, humming as she mused until the Doctor’s coughing jerked her from her reverie.

“ _Missy_.”

“What? Hm. You always look beautiful to me, dear, you know that, whichever face you’re wearing,” Missy replied absentmindedly, clearly still invested in her music sheets, although behind them her red-painted lips had tugged slowly but surely into a small, familiar, smirk. After a few seconds’ more pleading looks from the Doctor, and what might have been a mumbled ‘that was such a cop-out answer’, she finally turned her head. Those blue eyes scanned the blonde from head-to-toe, and her smirk faltered only slightly. (When Missy looked her over like that, it felt like an X-Ray scan, like everything was being revealed. Which was ridiculous, considering her best friend already knew everything remotely interesting that there _was_ to know.)

“Okay,” Missy conceded thoughtfully, pulling her gaze away and flicking it back to the black-and-white notes on her page. “Maybe you do need to go shopping. Otherwise you’ll get the idea of retrieving that awful scarf you used to be obsessed with.”

“Maybe?”

The first part was questioned, to avoid being affronted at the second. The scarf was a fixture of her existence some nine incarnations ago, and it was a wonder that Missy remembered it. Then again, they didn’t forget things like most humans do.

“Okay, you definitely do. Is that better for you?”

 “No, not really,” the Doctor replied, pacing the room before leaning back against the console, “I was hoping you would say it was fine so I could have an excuse to procrastinate shopping for a few days, personally.”

The smirk immediately widened, and Missy put down the music sheets, or rather almost dropped them, because they skittered to the floor. “Shocker. This Doctor is a procrastinator! Scandalous – how is a procrastinator supposed to save the world? Distress call – nah, I’ll do it later? TARDIS maintenance – maybe tomorrow? Saving the Earth for the seventeenth time – I’ll put it in my diary for next Friday?”

“If you keep making jokes like that,” the blonde woman warned, tousling her hair, “I’ll _procrastinate_ kissing you again.” Her green eyes, filled with mirth, danced in the dim light of the TARDIS, looking like the stars they hadn’t had on Floor 507 had instead been placed in her eyes.

“You wouldn’t,” Missy responded immediately, swinging her legs over the armchair, “You enjoy kissing me _far_ too much to ever do that, and we both know it.”

“I do,” was immediately conceded, and the two women crashed lips again when they met each other in the middle. “I do.”

“I might propose to you one day, you know, because you say that so much.”

Missy smiled; the Doctor’s laugh was always as charming as it always had been, so she tried to ignore the slightly crestfallen feeling lurking in her chest because she hadn’t taken the statement seriously. Even Missy didn’t know if it was a joke or entirely serious, but the fact that it had been assumed to be the former still stung slightly.

“Doctor…” She paused in the middle of her breath and didn’t breathe it out again for some time. “Doctor, we can’t…”

“Can’t what, honey?” the Doctor asked, tipping her chin up with a finger, “Please do breathe though. No matter what we can or can’t do, the thought of you not breathing scares me half to death, so…keep doing that, please.”

She obliged, exhaled, inhaled again, steadied her breathing. “We can’t travel the universe, yet. I’m sorry, I wish we could, but we can’t. We have to stop her – or you do, because I can’t.”

“Her?”

Missy looked at her, surprised she hadn’t caught on immediately. “Other-me. Regenerated-from-that-asshole-me-who-still-wants-to-kill-everyone me.”

“Oh. Her.” Of course, they would have to stop her, or rather the Doctor would - if Missy came out with her, they’d just assume that they were the same, because they were in many ways - and she wondered why she had thought it possible to just leave. She didn’t want Missy locked up again after all those years in the Vault, on her first venture outside.

At the sight of tears once again peeking from behind Missy’s eyelashes, the Doctor looked down at her with concern, and produced a box of tissues from apparently nowhere. (Don’t ask. Some ridiculous things are hidden around this place.) The tear-tracks shimmered against the Mistress’ pale skin until she smeared them away with the tissue, leaving make-up residue on the paper.

“This is why I was supposed to just die,” the brunette cried, “this is why I wasn’t supposed to live!”

“Don’t,” The Doctor held up one finger, staring at her. “Don’t you dare _ever_ say that again. I’ve just got you back and I don’t want to lose you again, do you hear me? You can’t think like that.”

“I was supposed to die back there in that forest _and_ you know it. That shot was meant to kill me and I was _meant t_ o die like that.” Missy nearly snapped but just reined back her tone to something more matter-of-fact. “Me travelling with you isn’t practical. I’m a criminal, and even when I try my best to be helpful, I just end up making things harder for you.”

She stepped back, away from her friend, away from the tissues. “You should really put me back in the Vault. I belong there, not here, where I can’t cause problems even when I’m not trying.”

“No – honey…” Inexplicably she was stumbling over and under her words, over explanations that weren’t quite right and excuses that just wouldn’t be enough. No words would ever be enough. “Please. You really can help me. Please don’t make me put you back in there all alone.”

The Doctor stepped forward, brought her in; a bundle of bitter tears, flyaway hair and fabric, and held her against her chest, letting her cry. Missy crying had become more and more of a common occurrence, and it had been discovered that it was best to let her cry, let her exhaust herself and fall asleep; sometimes when she woke up she’d have a better eye on the situation, or had forgotten whatever it was she had been crying about in the first place.

Missy laughed slightly into the fabric. “Maybe if you find other-me I can keep myself company, then,” she sniffed, and it was muffled but perfectly audible. Two Missys in one Vault? That could be disastrous, and it was a concept easily ruled out on principle. One Missy might not have the inclination to ‘build a gun out of leaves’ and escape, but the other certainly would. “But fine. How can I possibly help _you_ , my renegade world-saver?”

“You know what you did after you regenerated, right? If we can retrace your steps we can stop her early.”

A slow nod came from the other Time Lady – and she could tell from the look in her eyes that she was recalling the regeneration, the burning passion that had seared through her and transformed her to the way she was at this present time. And in those eyes, there was longing, longing to experience that burning-sun sensation one more time, when she was facing the reality that she might never be able to do that again if the younger her’s words proved true.

“Why didn’t I regenerate?” Missy asked, tilting her head curiously. “When you gave me your energy. I should have regenerated. That would have made this whole shebang _much_ easier, because they wouldn’t recognise me as, well, _me_.”

Neither of them knew the answer to that, but there were a few suggestions before they came to this one:

“Maybe the laser blast blocked your ability to regenerate, but couldn’t stop you being healed by my regeneration energy?”

Missy nodded, slowly, again, licking her lips. “That could explain it. He probably didn’t anticipate you actually finding me before I - _died_.”

What would death have been like? This question had been lingering on Missy’s mind since the sheer pain of the laser blast shot through her. Was there heaven, like those who were religious said? Was there hell, and if there was, was it as Alighieri had imagined it? Was there a middle – a limbo – for those who weren’t quite either? Were you reincarnated as someone else? Or was it just…nothing at all? Eternal blackness that you simultaneously see and don’t see in your deceased state?

Not knowing the answer to this was one of the few parts of not dying Missy resented, but she assumed she’d find out eventually. Sooner rather than later, if they didn’t solve the apparent no-regenerations problem they had on their hands. Humans had the unfortunate habit of eventually expiring of old age, poor loves. She didn’t want to die so passively as that - she wanted to go out dramatically, the truly fizzing firework she could be compared to in life.

“I bet he’d hate me even more now,” the Doctor chuckled, “Now that I’m a woman.”

“He hated you anyway. He hates everyone equally. But no, he doesn’t hate you even more now, since technically I _am_ him.”

“ _Touché_.”

“Picking up my French, I see?” Missy smirked, before pulling out a notebook. “Okay, so I woke up after being stabbed by…me, I suppose, at the top of the ship on Floor 1506. That’s where the Cybermen were.”

“And that’s how you got the Cybermen for 3W and the Dark Water,” the Doctor nodded in understanding, “Well, it’s too late to stop that part now, obviously.”

“Less of my own genius than I remember, then,” Missy grinned gingerly, “and more dumb luck. Funny – I thought it was you that thrived off that.”

“Wouldn’t that trap him – her, you -  in her own time loop, though? Die, regenerate, get the Cybermen, Vault, Floor 507, die, regenerate…”

“I’m not sure.” She bit her lip. “I still think that I shouldn’t be here. Or at the very least we should work out how I can regenerate.”

The only way the Doctor could think of was to go to Gallifrey, but they’d just as soon imprison Missy as help her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of it. A spark came to mind, and she smiled.

“I could give you one of my regenerations,” the Doctor suggested mildly. “Maybe that would work?”

“No. Don’t be stupid,” Missy retorted, immediately. “We can’t risk something as precious as one entire lifetime of yours for something we’re not sure would even work. I’m pretty sure it’s that I can’t use them, not that I don’t _have_ them.”

“It’s worth a go,” the Doctor said, pleadingly, “I have eleven more. I got a whole new cycle. It’ll make no difference, and it might even reactivate your ability to regenerate so you can use yours, too.”

Missy’s eyes were conflicted. A whole new lease on life seemed like a good idea. Then she could fully be the Doctor’s companion without being recognised as the criminal who ran amok through the streets of London with an army of Cybermen. But, all things considered, she particularly liked this face and its voice and especially her eyes; she’d quite like to keep them.

But the Doctor was so desperate, those green eyes so wide and begging her to accept this gift, that she hesitantly nodded. “If this works, we’re going shopping immediately. This…” Her hands gestured to the mildly Victorian garb – “Probably won’t suit me anymore. Also, I’d better not be a man again. I’d hate that, I’ve quite liked being a woman.”

“Okay,” The Doctor nodded, made her promise that they would go shopping immediately after this exercise, should it work. “Think about the person you want to be really hard – you never know, my energy _might_ be considerate. Considering I love you so much.”

A cheeky smirk curled on Missy’s lips again, and considering this might be the last time the blonde sees Missy like this, she presses one last kiss to the brunette’s.

“I love you,” she whispered, and put her hands on Missy’s chest, pushing the regeneration energy through once more.


	3. Chapter 3

The Doctor stepped back after a while, and decided to leave Missy to the privacy of her own regeneration, whether it worked or it didn’t. She’d expressed the desire to feel the flares again many times, and she didn’t want to distract her from the sensations and feelings of the energy popping, making things new.

“I’m going to get some tea,” she called over her shoulder as she crossed into the kitchen, “and make some toast. I’ll see you – however you are – when I get back, alright?”

Missy nodded, smiled, replied “Sure.” She savoured the sound of that voice because she knew she probably wouldn’t hear it that way again, except perhaps in one of her memory-dreams; her eyes followed the back of her retreating best friend until she disappeared around the corner into the kitchen, at which point she deduced she was a safe enough distance away and took a breath.

Energy exploded out of her, white, hot, fiery, raging. The send-off from this body that she thought the man had robbed her of, that she would never get to feel. _Like a sun._ It seethed, burned, and crackled with power, consumed her in its thrilling pyre. She was a sun, she was the sun to her Doctor, what her heart orbited around, and her beauty just as bright. And the Doctor – the new, beautiful Doctor – was her sun, too.

The sounds of the kettle bubbling to life on the other side of the wall crossed Missy’s mind temporarily – how cute and domestic it was. It almost seemed like they were normal, living together, and not on a floating space box in the middle of the sky. It occurred to her to follow the Doctor’s advice and start thinking – if this mental picture she was painting came off, the Doctor would be dripping with jealousy when she came back out of the kitchen. Maybe drop the tea and smash the mug on the ground, and that much would be a pity – just more to buy when they were out shopping.

Much to her dismay the flames, the thrill, the buzzing of it skipping along her skin, soon subsided – not to be felt again for some time, maybe never again. Only time will tell. She moved her head slightly and made a muffled noise of surprise at the sheet of red hair that fell across her eyes, but she quickly smiled. That had worked, if only by coincidence, and she couldn’t wait for the Doctor to see her. Still a woman, and ginger, apparently. Nice.

“Dearest,” she sing-songed, thoroughly enjoying this voice, “I’m just going to the bathroom, you almost done in the kitchen?”

There was a muffled noise to the affirmative from the other woman, the sort of noise that gave Missy the idea that the Doctor probably had a spoon lodged between her teeth. She nearly laughed but held it back, instead proceeding into the kitchen, nearly tripping over her own clothing. She was…a fair amount taller now, it seemed; slim, tall, and unquestionably ginger – one glance in the bathroom mirror showed her wayward, firebrand curls – long, and thick. Probably quite hard to maintain, but also probably worth it.

And her eyes. Not quite the same as they were before, but still a beautiful hue of blue-grey, shifting in the light. Good enough for Missy, at least, to smirk at herself in the mirror. She was younger, much younger, younger even than the Doctor’s new face. Someone to be envious of, really, all things considered. She pulled out the lipstick from her pocket on instinct, and was gratified to discover that the shade would fit her just the same.

Now where was her voice from? It wasn’t Scottish, but it didn’t sound English – was she Irish, now? She thought that was it.

“Are you done?” she called around the corner, and it appeared the Doctor had vacated back into the main area with the controls. “Are you ready for a surprise?”

“Your voice is a surprise already,” the Doctor responded, “are you _Irish_?”

“I think so,” Missy chuckled. “We’ll find out when we travel and people on Earth always ask if I’m from somewhere if I have an accent. Now, are you sat down?”

“Yes.”

Missy turned the corner and walked back in, resting against the controls as the Doctor so commonly did, smirking away. The Doctor’s eyes widened, probably at how young she looked, probably at her frame – and then her mouth fell agape as she finally noticed the detail she probably should have noticed first, the hair.  
“I can’t bloody believe it,” the Doctor gasped, “You’re ginger!"

“Now, now, how does the song go,” Missy tutted, “ _Only a ginger, can call another ginger ginger_ ~”

“Where did you learn that one?”

“Around,” Being non-committal was just as fun as Missy remembered it to be. “Well, I figured it was time for me to steal your idea rather than you always stealing mine for once, and it’s nice. I like it.”

“I quite like you like this too. I’ll get over the jealousy eventually.”

“You know, it only took me…eighteen times to get here? You might be lucky to get one before you’re done, too!” Missy airily hummed, “Now, I believe you promised me shopping, didn’t you?”

“I did,” the Doctor half-grumbled, and she followed the rather over-excited Missy out of the TARDIS door and into the London streets.

This was the first time Missy had been part of ‘real civilisation’, that is, not on the TARDIS, in the vault or on a synthetic solar floor, in some seventy years. That filled her with such wonder, such childlike innocence at meeting the world and its sights, all over again, that the Doctor couldn’t help but marvel at how young she seemed. How would she react to re-encountering the whole universe, and its stars, seeing them and visiting them rather than burning them?

The Doctor took her arm, tugged her close so she wouldn’t wander off into the rapidly mounting crowds. Missy scowled at her for the gesture, but eventually settled in tandem with her, until she was tugged into a store that looked like it would stock something suitable for their…now younger bodies.

“This is quite strange,” Missy remarked, thoughtfully, looking around at the rainbow of bright and pastel colours, paying no mind to the weird looks they both got. She didn’t seem to find what she wanted until her eyes landed on the corner where the black items were hidden away; she tugged her arm out of her friend’s grip and made a beeline for it. “Okay, they still have dark colours. I’m fine with this."

She let her go, let her flounce off into the corner with all her dramatism and flair, before turning to the light blue fabrics. Black wouldn’t be so much her thing as Missy’s, and God knew that Missy would rage if there was any other excuse to believe that she’d ‘stolen her thunder’.

It was a while before Missy came back out – the Doctor’s already gotten her outfit by then – and paid for her own. It’s black, of course it is, a shirt with short, slightly more transparent sleeves and tight-fit trousers (clearly designed for style rather than for comfort, but Missy was superficial).

“You definitely look…different,” the Doctor spluttered, gesturing to the bag that her old clothing was in. Missy walked right past her, nearly-floating, every inch of her graceful, and paid the cashier. Immediately she got a compliment on her accent, was asked if it was Irish at which she nodded. By the time she passed the Doctor by again, she was positively glowing with pride and barely contained glee.

“That was an interesting way of saying ‘You look great, Missy,’” the redhead said after a while’s walking back through the streets towards the TARDIS, “are you getting a little bit blush-y and shy, dear?”

“I don’t get blush-y and shy,” said the Doctor indignantly, getting very blush-y, and shy.

Missy tilted her head, smirked. “Sure, you don’t.” They stopped by the door to the TARDIS and Missy decided to test her luck with the blue box, clicking her fingers.

The door swung open, triggering Missy to walk inside with an excited skip in her step, a lamp-like grin on her lips. “Well, that worked,” she chuckled, “I guess she really has warmed to the thought of us together, eh Doctor?” She winked flirtatiously, snapped her fingers again so the Doctor would have to open the door herself, and walked into the kitchen, still giggling.

 

 


End file.
